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NaNoWriMo

Listening to Aaron Smith’s explanation (in the recording of Chris Evans’ interview of Aaron and me for WRUV) of the historical situation that forms the backdrop for the novel he was writing during NaNoWriMo, I began thinking about the different ways that facts can be involved in fiction.

In the normal course of things, facts are more associated with non-fiction, and imagination with fiction. But in Aaron’s work, for example, the actions of his characters had to fit into a complex, multi-faceted historical context.

Historical fiction is one way in which a novel can meld fact and imagination and works of historical fiction are likely to be among the most fact-laden works of fiction. At the other extreme, novels can be almost entirely formed of imaginary material, with very few specific facts involved. But there’s a lot of room between the two extremes.

Here are some of the ways fact enters into the fantasy/science fiction/family/quintology that I’m writing called The Bent Parallels Quintology.

• Home furnishings came from a variety of museum websites and catalogs, with my favorite carpet (the one in the library on the third floor) being found at Absolute Rugs website.

And that’s only a small sampling: there’s much, much more.

My story is not “about” any of these facts. But all of them, and more, enter into the telling, and in some cases, the story must work to accommodate the facts (as in choosing a plausible month for the excerpt I read on Chris’s show to enable the constellations that need to be seen to actually be visible in the sky at that time).

And I think that’s one of the key differences for me in writing fiction and non-fiction. In non-fiction, I use my imagination to gain a sense of my audience, what they know already and need to know about the topic, and how what I’ve written is likely to strike them. But since I mainly write informational text when I write non-fiction, the facts are what I’m writing about.

So the facts dominate in my non-fiction in a way that even my fact-laced fiction doesn’t approach. And one of the things I learned during NaNoWriMo, writing my first extended work of fiction, is that this makes the experience of writing a novel quite different from writing informational text.

A lot of the time I spend writing non-fiction is spent couching the facts in language that accurately conveys the meaning and making sure that every fact is in the proper relationship (time-order, importance, etc.) to every other fact. Whereas in fiction, the facts are more like a combination of foundation on which the fiction is built and decoration with which it is adorned and paths down which it travels.

In my interview with Chris Evans on WRUV (University of Vermont radio) yesterday, the subject of the differences in writing fiction and nonfiction was touched on. I’d like to expand on it a bit here.

During NaNoWriMo, I began writing a novel, a genre that I had not worked in since my bachelor’s paper—a mystery set at the Quadrangle Club, the faculty club at the University of Chicago, where I was an undergraduate. Since writing is one of the chief ways that I earn a living, one might think that I would apply a similar process and approach to writing for NaNoWriMo as I do to writing in general. In fact, most of my writing is nonfiction, and as a result, some aspects are quite different.

AUDIENCE

Similarities include the concept of audience. In nearly all the projects I do that I originate, I am aiming for a broad audience—usually middle school and up. A lot of my nonfiction writing is either informative in a general way or explicitly instructional—though marketed as trade books rather than textbooks. People who are at the very beginning of learning about a subject and have had the motivation to find the article or buy the book, be they 13 or 73, are in something of a similar situation and need more or less similar insights and knowledge to learn about whatever-it-is.

With this novel, I am aiming at a similarly broad audience. But whereas with nonfiction, engaging the audience means telling them what they need to know about the subject, engaging an audience in a work of fiction is a very different process.

SEQUENCE

Another similarity—though a limited one, in this case—is the need (at least, I feel that it is a need) to be able to maintain a sense of the way that material is coming across to the reader (i.e, what they know and don’t know at any given point), what inferences they may be making, what needs to be defined, and the order in which the revelation should occur for maximum effect. In both fiction and nonfiction (as opposed to, say, a photograph or painting), the audience encounters the material in a specific order over time—an order over which (unless they jump ahead on the page) I have some control.

But when we get to particulars of creating the sequence, writing fiction parts company from most of the nonfiction that I write.

My characteristic set-up for writing non-fiction is categorical. Whatever I’m writing about, I figure out either the or a means of dividing it into logical and coherent segments that readers may be seeking or that will help them take in the information in a comprehensible sequence. When I say “the or a,” I’m referring to the fact that some topics and some genres may set the categories pretty tightly. For example, my last published work was a reference work,Barron’s American Slang Dictionary and Thesaurus. Dictionaries have some pretty standard elements that you expect to find in each entry, including entry word, pronunciation, part of speech, definition, etc.

So do how-to articles. An article on “Making Salt Crystals” will not meet reader expectations unless it includes a list of ingredients and a sequence of steps in the proper order to achieve the advertised results. Of course, if I’m writing about an unfamiliar subject, I start by learning enough about it that I can write about it with some authority and have a sense of a good way to present the information to the reader.

All gone with fiction.

Writing my first novel, I’ve been working from a rough sequence of events—what Mieke Bal in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative refers to as the fabula—and rearranging them into the order in which the reader will meet them, a story in Bal’s terminology, which is quite different from the chronology. Where should the story start? How and when are past events revealed? Who is conveying them? These questions are much more open than they are in the kind of nonfiction I write. The process has proved to be quite different than organizing an article or a dictionary. And the order of presentation is quite a bit more malleable.

By the time NaNoWriMo began, my story didn’t begin where I had been planning for it to begin. I had spent three and a half years planning, writing notes in journals and on scraps of paper, researching, etc., before I started writing the first novel of my quintology (it started as a single volume fairy tale—but that’s a topic for another article), and up until the day I began what will be the first chapter of the first novel, I had thought that the first novel was going to be set mainly in another world. In my first draft of the first chapter of the first book in December, 2008, the first two sentences read:

There was quite a lot of speculation when Master Bartholomew took up residence in the turkey coop. Granted, it was his turkey coop.

Both Bartholomew and his turkey coop, by the way, are on the planet Irrelya, rather than Earth and this particular incident is not likely to be come into the story until Book 3, although it happened before Book 1 begins.

By the time the first draft of the “real” chapter one of the first book was written in May, 2009, the location had changed to Earth and the book opened in the midst of an argument between teenage twins, a boy and a girl. It now begins:

“We have to make an exception,” the girl exclaimed.

“No,” said the boy, quietly but resolutely.

Changes this drastic are simply not possible in the non-fiction I characteristically write.

But . . . other topics and subgenres of nonfiction are more open-ended. Look at what I did with the chronology in organizing the last bit of this blog:

1. By the time NaNoWriMo began – Nov. 2009
2. I had spent three and a half years planning . . . before I started writing – Fall, 2005 to May, 2009
3. (it started as a single volume fairy tale) – Fall, 2005
4. the day I began what will be the first chapter of the first novel (May 24, 2009)
5. I had thought – Fall, 2005 – May, 2009
6. In my first draft of the first chapter of the first book – December, 2008
7. By the time the first draft of the “real” chapter one of the first book was written – May 24, 2009
8. It now begins – Today

Today I was privileged to have the opportunity to experience a special kind of reward for participating in NaNoWriMo: at the invitation of Chris Evans, I read an excerpt from Chapter 14 of the first novel of my Bent Parallels Quintology on UVM station WRUV this morning at 10. Aaron Smith, another Verimo, was the other guest and read the beginning of his novel, tantalizingly named The Water Beggars’ Tune.

Bios are here posted on Chris’s blog Writers@WRUV, and tomorrow, Chris will be posting the excerpts and an MP3 of the show, in case you missed it.

One of the interesting elements for me was how much editing I was led to do in the course of preparing simply from the experience of reading aloud. The excerpt I sent to Chris on Monday at his request (to give him an idea of what was coming and allow him to vet it for possible FCC violations) was not—and I cleared this with Chris ahead of time—not exactly the same as what I read on the air.

Because a high percentage of the excerpt is dialogue between two characters, reading the piece was—in effect—acting it out and allowed me to test the veracity of the characterization: did it hold up to scrutiny? My answer when I first read it was, “not yet.”

I changed words to synonyms that flowed more trippingly off the tongue in the particular context; rearranged sentence parts; changed the order of the first several paragraphs to make the “argument” of the section progress more persuasively; added a puzzled interjection from one of the characters at a point where she had earlier said nothing; and repeated one particular word to make a stronger connection between sections.

I knew from the start that winning NaNoWriMo in NaNoWriMo terms was not possible for me this year. First of all, I had begun thinking about a novel in 2005, it had grown to a set of five since then, and I had been drafting the first chapter (and redrafting and redrafting) since May. It didn’t make sense to begin another project when this was the one I had been tinkering with—smoothing out an idea here, changing a character there. But NaNoWriMo gave me a framework in which I could choose to focus on it and do some writing in earnest, and I took up the challenge for that reason.

Besides the fact that my novel was already started, I couldn’t get signed in until November 7. Since doing NaNoWriMo only seriously entered my thoughts when my daughter, who won last year, mentioned it to me a couple of days before it began, So I really couldn’t get a drop on the great November 1 sign-up rush, and consequently got caught in the great November 1 NaNoWriMo site slowdown. Oh well.

In addition, not rewriting when rewriting was needed did not make sense for my project. With four following books and four years of planning, coherence was more important to me than volume. I write for a living. I know that the words will come, in time. But leaving core issues in a tangle could mean a whole lot of untangling later.

A fourth reason that 50,000 words was not my prime goal is that while a good portion of my stories depend on what I make up from my imagination, a large segment also depends on research. In about mid-November, I “discovered” unexpectedly that one of my characters had gotten hold of of a set of cards made by another character and was using them to tell fortunes. In order to a) make the two disparate uses of the card set work and b) make the fortunes viable, I had to design the card set. Four days for research on an element that is almost entirely visual.

So ending with 37,068 words, which is what I have now, and what I’ll have 59 minutes from now when midnight strikes in Vermont, is fine for me. I’ve made a lot of progress in a way that’s consistent and well-integrated with the entire story I plan to tell.

I’ll be reading an excerpt from my novel on WRUV on the show “Proximate Blues” on Thursday, December 3 at 10 a.m. Two other Verwrimos will also be there: Chris Evans, who hosts the show, and another guest besides myself. Hope you can join us: http://www.uvm.edu/~wruv/ or listen the MP3 posted after the show.

• Many, many high school team names, organized alphabetically (did you know that there are two US high school teams called the Aardvarks? How about a team called the Zebras? Would you believe, the Lawyers? The Sea Turtles? The Grape Pickers? The Pied Pipers? The Koalas?

• Top team names by state.

• Top team names across the country. Quick, what’s your guess for most popular high school sports team name?

In Bal’s explication, fabula refers to the chronological sequence of events that underlies the narrative. Story refers to the way in which the fabula is presented—all the choices made about narration, dialogue, sequence, etc., all the artful choices that shape the way the fabula is revealed. And text is the final form through which the story reaches its audience, which in the case of NaNoWriMo is a given—a novel.

The distinction between story and text is initially unclear, I think, when Bal defines story as “a fabula that is presented in a certain manner,” because the word manner seems like it could encompass aspects of both story and text. One way to think of it is that a story of, say, the sequence of events that we know as Cinderella, that was decided to be completely done through dialogue and in chronological order still could result in a variety of texts including a puppet show and a play, or even an opera. The text is only the concrete form in which the story reaches the audience, it seems.

Theoretically speaking (and I say that because I have never done NaNoWriMo before and am not speaking from experience), the implications for NaNoWriMo seem to be that if a writer does not know the fabula before beginning, but is letting it develop simultaneously with the story, the scope for crafting the story in ways that are quite distinct from the fabula (such as, starting in media res and other approaches that take the story telling out of chronological order) are limited, as is the ability to lay groundwork earlier for what happens later, and the ability to present material in order to create an effect.

Add the admonition to “forge ahead” without rewriting, and it seems to me possible that a NaNoWriMoer could pour a lot of effort into a draft that will be closer to fabula than to story.

After beginning chapter 6 of my NaNoWriMo novel yesterday, I stopped short and read chapters 1-5 all together.

There is—intentionally—a great deal of dialogue. The action of this novel is driven by communication.

But I realized that in focusing on that element of the story, I had not yet given sufficient attention to establishing place: there isn’t yet “a there there.” In considering this, I looked at several beginnings of books that bear some resemblance to mine: multi-volume works for YA and up, and found them all very quick to establish place.

I also realized that in focusing on establishing characterization and setting the plot in motion, I hadn’t given the depth of thought necessary to establishing the persona of my narrator and attended consciously to choices about how the reader will encounter the story that currently resides in my mind and an odd collection of scraps of paper, computer files, and iPod notes.

I didn’t know that the story was going to have any significant part, let alone begin, in this world, and the addition of a major setting has led to the addition of a large number of new characters, some of whom will appear in only one scene and some of whom will be integrated into the rest of the story.

I didn’t have an approach planned, but my strategy of going back and revising when something written earlier bothers me —although counter to the general cry of “Write on! Never look back!”—seems to be working well for me, as far as comfort goes, if not word production.

At the moment, the element that I’m thinking will require the most smoothing when December rolls around is the narrator’s voice.